Abstract
Buckling-Restrained Braced steel frames (BRBFs) exhibit well-controlled seismic behavior due to their excellent lateral load resisting capacity and energy dissipation capacity. However, they always suffer from concentration of inter-storey drifts and excessive residual deformations in weak/soft stories under strong earthquakes. A novel system of Energy-Dissipative Rocking Column (EDRC) is proposed in this paper to improve the seismic performance of multi-storey BRBFs. It consists of dual hinge supported steel column branches and replaceable steel strip dampers between them. Nonlinear time historey analyses are conducted on a six-storey prototype BRBFs with EDRCs to investigate the effectiveness of EDRCs on improving the seismic performance of BRBFs under different levels of earthquakes. It is found that the EDRC can not only mitigate the maximum and residual inter-storey drifts, but facilitate more uniform distribution of inter-storey drifts. A rational range of EDRC stiffness ratio less than 0.2 is recommended for the seismic design of BRBFs with EDRCs.
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